SIDEBAR. Michael Hastings: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read »

Michael Hastings: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read»

The bulbs are lanced in the afternoon, and the milky sap seeps out through the night, thickening and oxidizing into a dark-brown hue. In the mornings, the nishtgar go from bulb to bulb scraping off the sticky resin with a flat blade, which they wipe into a tin can hanging around their necks. Fifteen workers can harvest a productive hectare within a week. When you consider that Helmand alone has at least 100,000 hectares under cultivation, you get a sense of the vast amount of manpower that must be mobilized.

Over the next two days, Hekmat drives me around, visiting the poppy fields. On one three-acre plot, we find half a dozen men at work, overseen by a bent, white-bearded old farmer named Hajji Abdullah Jan. I ask him why he's not worried about getting caught in a secure, government-controlled area like Marjah. "The government has been distracted by the elections," he says, referring to this past spring's presidential contest. "And anyhow, they're corrupt." He and the other farmers I speak to say that they were paying around $40 per acre in bribes to the local police. "Next year, I'll plant twice as much," he says, regarding the field with satisfaction.

Marjah had been largely poppy-free since the arrival of the Marines, due to eradication campaigns and the flood of cash the Americans pumped into the economy. Now that foreign aid has dried up and the government's interest in punishing farmers has waned, people like Mirza Khan and Abdullah Jan followed simple economic logic: Wheat prices were too low to be profitable, so this year, all over Marjah, poppy was being planted.

"Narco corruption went to the top of the Afghan government," wrote a U.S. official. "President Karzai was playing us like a fiddle."

Back at Hekmat's house, I ask his uncle Mirza Khan if he'll show me the results of his harvest thus far. He returns with a polyurethane bag the size of a soccer ball and hefts it onto the carpet. He unwinds a thick rubber strap, and a sour, vegetable odor fills the room. Inside is a mass of raw opium, with a rich brown color and a moist texture, like pulped figs. It's about 10 pounds, a half-acre's yield. "If I'm lucky, I might get 60,000 kaldar for this," he says. That's about $600.

"Do you know how much this is worth on the streets of London?" I ask him. He shrugs, and I make a quick calculation. Ten pounds of opium can be refined into a pound of pure heroin. Cut it to 30 percent purity and sell it by the gram – that's 1,500 grams at a hundred bucks a pop. "This is worth over $150,000."

That's a 25,000 percent markup. We stare at each other for a moment, and Mirza Khan gives a chuckle. He shakes his head in amazement. A future hundred grand sitting in the living room of a guy who doesn't have plumbing, electricity or furniture. Someone between him and that junkie is clearly making a killing.

From the farmers' fields at harvest time, Afghanistan's opium was beginning a journey that would span vast global webs of traffickers, corrupt officials and powerful militant groups. Back in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, I arrange an interview with a drug smuggler, who insists on meeting in a neutral location; the city is calm, but threats lie close beneath the surface, both from internecine drug-mafia disputes and the Taliban.

Afghan men weed poppy fields in the Saraw Valley in Charchino District, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, January 26th, 2013. Kate Geraghty/Getty

At a little teahouse on a quiet street, I'm ushered into a small back room whose walls and carpets vie in griminess, and I am introduced to a stocky middle-aged man with a skullcap and beard. I'll call him Sami. He tells me that he's from the district of Garmsir, near the Pakistani border. When war with the Soviets broke out, he fled the country, along with millions of other Afghan refugees. He grew up in a camp near the border town of Chagai, in Pakistan. After finishing 11th grade, he got work as a driver and began to ply the route from Garmsir to -Chagai, smuggling opium through the desert wastes. "There are more than a hundred ways through the desert," he tells me. "The police checkpoints are in one, and the rest of the desert is free for smugglers."

Afghanistan is landlocked, and its borders leak opium like sieves into five neighboring countries. In recent years, the northern route to Russia and Europe via Tajikistan has gained importance, but the southern route through Balochistan still accounts for the largest portion of opium that leaves the country. From there, it is smuggled into Iran, and then onward to the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Africa. Most of it is destined for Western Europe.

The Balochistan border area between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is one of the most remote and lawless places on Earth. Two hundred thousand square miles of desert and dune seas are broken only by spindly granitic eruptions; the ethnic Baloch and Pashtun tribes that control the area are heavily armed and have been involved in various kinds of smuggling for centuries. Some are nominally cooperative with the state, while others are engaged with a bewildering mix of insurgent groups: secular Baloch rebels who seek independence from Pakistan, Sunni anti-Iranian groups and a wide array of Islamist militants, including the Taliban. It's a natural haven for illicit activities.

At the center of this world is Baramcha, a smuggling hub on the Afghan side of the border in the Chagai Hills, 150 miles to the south and free of government control since 2001. It functions as a kind of switching station for much of the opium trade. The harvest by farmers like Mirza Khan is consolidated by local traders into larger shipments – ranging from a few hundred pounds to several tons – and sent to Baramcha, where it is purchased by Pakistani and Iranian smugglers who carry it abroad. The big deals are conducted between trusted parties, with money sent via the informal money-trading system known as hawala, which is also a linchpin in global money-laundering circuits. One side pays the hawaladar, who gives you a phone number and a code that, used at a corresponding hawaladar a country or continent away, lets the recipient claim the money. The accounts are settled later.

Baramcha is jointly controlled by the Taliban and a handful of powerful smuggling families, pre-eminent among them that of Hajji Juma Khan, a drug baron who was arrested by the DEA in Jakarta in 2008. Today, his relative Hajji Sharafuddin presides over the smugglers of the town, while the Taliban enforces security. "The Taliban has a court there to resolve people's problems," says Sami. "The security situation is good for the people living there."

Baramcha was once just a collection of mud-walled compounds, but these days you can find late-model Land Cruisers driving past concrete mansions – this despite sporadic raids and airstrikes by U.S. and Afghan forces. The area is so remote that raiding teams would have to refuel their American helicopters in the desert using fuel bladders parachuted out the back of a cargo plane. "There's an area of town that we used to call Hajji JMK Village," says a member of Afghanistan's elite commando units who has hit the area a number of times with Marines and British special forces. "It's like a Sherpur in the desert," he says, referring to a neighborhood in Kabul notorious for its gaudy "poppy palaces" built by the country's warlords. "They had everything out there: generators, appliances, fancy cars. We used to take ice cream out of their freezers."

During the raids, he tells me, Baramcha's inhabitants would flee across the border to Pakistan, where Pakistani forces would line up and stand guard until the Americans left. "The drug smugglers and the ISI are tight together," he says, referring to Pakistan's intelligence service. Sami makes similar claims about Baramcha's leadership. "They have houses on the Pakistani side," he says. (The ISI denies any connection to smugglers or the Taliban.)

The U.N. has estimated that the Taliban makes hundreds of millions of dollars from taxing opium and other illicit activities. But that's only a fraction of the $3 billion that Afghanistan earns from the drug trade. To find the biggest beneficiaries of opium, you need to go from the poppy palaces in Baramcha to the ones in Kabul.

The United States' alliances with opium traffickers in Afghanistan go back to the 1980s, when the CIA waged a dirty war to undermine the Soviet occupation of the country. Though opium had been grown for centuries in Afghanistan's highlands, large-scale cultivation was introduced in Helmand by Mullah Nasim Akhund-zada, a mujahedeen commander who was receiving support from the ISI and the CIA. USAID's irrigated farmlands were perfect for cash-crop production, and as Akhundzada wrested control of territory from the Communist government, he introduced production quotas and offered cash advances to farmers who planted opium.

When Afghanistan descended into a civil war in the Nineties, the Akhundzadas rose as the province's dominant warlords, only to be forced out in 1995 by the rise of the Taliban. Though the fundamentalist movement strictly prohibited drug consumption, the support of wealthy opium traders was crucial to its early success.

In 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Omar banned opium. AP

In the summer of 2000, the country's fundamentalist leaders announced a total ban on opium cultivation, "a decision by the Taliban that we welcome," as former Secretary of State Colin Powell said. It remains a mystery why the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, made the call. But the Taliban enforced his decision with their customary harshness. In Helmand, those caught planting poppy were beaten and then paraded through the village with their faces blackened with motor oil. The following spring, the only significant opium harvest was in the corner of the northeast that was still controlled by the Taliban's rivals, the Northern Alliance. Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.

Then history intervened. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration, seeking a "light footprint," partnered with anti-Taliban warlords, including the Northern Alliance, to take control of the country. In its quest for vengeance, the U.S. allowed figures accused of being involved in grave civil-war-era human rights abuses to come to power; these included people like Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, whose rival mujahedeen factions shelled Kabul to rubble and who would later become the country's vice president and a leading member of Parliament, respectively.

These were the first in a series of decisions that helped revive the Afghan opium economy in a drastically expanded form. Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons. Meanwhile, the international community and the Afghan government paid lip service to counternarcotics, with the latter adopting an official strategy that fantasized about opium production being reduced by 75 percent in five years and eliminated entirely within 10.

Hamid Karzai, who had been plucked from obscurity to serve as president, was busy cementing, with U.S. acquiescence, a political order deeply linked to the opium trade. In the north, he wooed the Northern Alliance commanders as partners; in his southern homeland, he appointed Sher Mohammad Akhundzada as governor of Helmand, the nephew of the now-deceased Mullah Nasim, the same guy who had first introduced large-scale poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. "Narco corruption went to the top of the Afghan government," wrote Thomas Schweich, who served as a senior U.S. counternarcotics official in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2008. "Sure, Karzai had Taliban enemies who profited from drugs, but he had even more supporters who did." (Spokesmen for both Karzai and current President Ashraf Ghani declined to comment for this story.)

These were boom times for Helmand's drug smugglers. In Lashkar Gah, I meet a man I'll call Saleem, a former smuggler who started his first heroin lab in 2002, as a way of moving up the value chain and expanding his margins. With his pendulous gut and cherubic, rosy-cheeked face, Saleem looks like Santa's drug-dealing little brother. "Opium takes up a lot of space, and there's less profit," he says, explaining his decision to go into the manufacturing business. He and others in the opium trade seemed to inhabit a separate world from the war, one where money was all that counted. "I have worked in the government-controlled areas, as well as the Taliban-controlled areas," he says, laughing. "In some places, we could see the Taliban's checkpoints from the factory. When we were in the government's areas, we paid money to the local officials."

Saleem sold his heroin to Iranian traffickers in Nimroz, a large, mostly desert province to the west of Helmand whose economy rests almost entirely on opium. Like other smugglers and Afghan law-enforcement sources that I spoke to, he describes a system where the police and local government officials were an integral part of the chain, to the point where the police would often transport drugs on his behalf, especially over the final, most dangerous stretches, where the Iranian border forces were waging a bitter war against smugglers. "We would talk to someone in the government, and that person would take the drugs to the border, where the Iranian smugglers had their own person waiting," Saleem says.

Hamid Karzai, second from right, is met by his half brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, left, in Argandab district of Kandahar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan on October 9th, 2010. Allauddin Khan/AP

For the first five years, there was little risk involved. Business was good. But international embarrassment was growing over Afghanistan's booming opium production. Law enforcement agencies like the DEA were starting to build up their activities in Kabul. The British, who were set to take over Helmand as part of NATO's- expanding mission, insisted in 2005 that Karzai's pick for governor, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, be removed, after a British-led team raided his compound and discovered nine tons of opium and heroin. (Akhundzada claimed he had seized it from smugglers and was going to destroy it.) A confrontation was brewing between the drug-enforcement community on one side, and Karzai and the Afghan government on the other. But a third force would soon enter the debate: the Pentagon's generals, who weren't going to let concerns over drug trafficking derail their troop surge.

Atelling characteristic of the Afghan narco state – and of narco states in general – is how often the fox is selected to guard the henhouse. One drug courier from Helmand was caught with a letter of safe passage signed by the head of Afghanistan's counternarcotics police, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud. A convicted heroin trafficker, Izzatullah Wasifi, was appointed by Karzai as the head of an anti-corruption agency. "Karzai was playing us like a fiddle," wrote Schweich, the U.S. counternarcotics official.

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